Can expect | yesterday. But he refused to | se

PRICES GO UP, UP, UP

Price boosts predicted for butter, cheese

The daily press headlines tell the inflation story. Tea, taxes,
food, utilities all going up. Match this with unemployment as high
as during the depression of the 30’s.

deceuse of in- ers in Woodstock that price

TURKISH WORKERS FIGHT FOR RIGHTS

FRANKFURT — More than
400 delegates representing over
one million . Turkish foreign
workers in West Germany held
the founding congress Feb. 26-27
of the Federation of Turkish
Workers in West Germany, under
the theme of ‘‘Defense of Basic
Human Rights’.

The congress showed that Tur-
kish workers have no freedom of:

BELL OPERATORS
VOTE TO STRIKE

MONTREAL — Bell Canada
operators, here, voted March 16,
along with other members of the
Communications Union of Canada
in Toronto, Oshawa, Port Hope,
and Peterborough, who had voted
earlier, to endorse a strike man-
date by the 8,000-member tele-
phone operators’ union in Ontario
and Quebec.

Votes still remain to be. taken in
Quebec City, and Ottawa but the
margin of support for astrike in all
centres so far, is well over 90%.
Union officials say a walkout is un-
likely for several weeks.

DRIVERS BACK UP

_SALESMEN’S FIGHT

_ KITCHENER — A picket line
set up by six striking salesmen for
Kitchener Beverages Ltd., in-
their fight for a first contract as
members of the Canadian Brew-
ery Workers union, closed the
plant down when about 30 truck
drivers and production workers in
the same union refused to cross.

-AIB ABOLISHED BY

QUEBEC GOVERN-
MENT

QUEBEC — The provincial
government announced March 16
the abolition of its own so-called

‘Anti-Inflation Board’’ by. an...

movement, no chance to learn a
trade, are denied insurance and
unemployment benefits, and pay
an average of 40% more in rents
than West Germans while their
housing lacks basic sanitary
facilities. The federation said it
would fight for human rights and
the implementation by West
Germany of the Helsinki
Agreement. :

order-in-council, to force
municipalities across the province,
locked in strikes with their police
forces, to abide by a 17.4% wage
increase recommended by Finance
Minister Jacques Parizeau. The
municipalities offered 12.2% .say-
ing they couldn’t break the law.

CP AIR
DROPS 200
VANCOUVER — CP Air of
Vancouver announed March 16
the layoff of about 200 flight at-
tendants, maintenance and office
personnel to recover profit losses
in 1976.
The company also announced
its service to the public would be
cut back: with fewer flights on
many routes including the trans-
continental.

JOURNAL UNIONS

CHARGE BAD FAITH

OTTAWA — After Ottawa
Journal publisher L. A. Lalonde
refused a Labor Ministry prop-
osal to end the four-month-old
lockout by the paper of its. or-
ganized employees in several
unions, the unions charged man-
agement with bargaining in bad
faith and have called on both fed-
eral and provincial governments
to withhold advertising from the
paper. :
A ‘meeting with the Ontario
Labor Relations Board to discuss
the charges has. been requested.

A hell of a way to run a railway!

Following Confederation in
1867, the real railroad-building
era got under way. From then un-
til the end of the last century the
east to west continental railways
became the links that bound
Canada together from the Atlan-
tic to the Pacific. Sir Allan McNab

’ who coined the phrase “‘railroads

are my politics’? expressed the
thoughts of the capitalist tycoons
of that day. Enormous subsidies,
in both.cash and land grants, plus
the fierce exploitation of immig-
rant labor from both Europe and
Asia, accumulated fabulous

- amounts of wealth in the hands of

a few rich exploiters. This be-
came the foundation of banking
and industrial capital in the hands
of the ruling capitalist class in
Canada and its foreign partners.

After the First World War a
huge influx of immigrant settlers
completed the settlement of the
prairies. Business was booming
during the mid-1920’s and up to
the big depression in the fall of
1929. But the boom did not pre-
vent the Great Norther Railway
from falling in to bankruptcy
which led to a government
takeover and the creation of the

“Canadian National or CNR as we

know it. One of the reasons for
the takeover was. over-
capitalization. The nationaliza-
tion meant that the country’s
tax-payers became the guarantors
of the huge interest.on all of the
watered stock in the CNR,. which
to this day has meant that this
railway always ended up in the
red regardless of how much
surplus capital was produced in
the course of its operation.

In the meantime, the second
continental railway, the Grand
Trunk Canadian Pacific, thrived
on political patronage and be-
came the epi-centre of an empire
of transportation facilities and
other subsidiary operations in
many directions, including mining
operations and shipping, etc. Dur-
ing the big depression of the
1930s, the ruling class advanced
the idea of railroad amalgamation.
This meant that the CPR would
swallow up the CNR in the in-
terest of centralization and grea-
ter monopoly: profits at the ex-
pense of the workers on the rail-
ways and the national interest.
But the Canadian people, particu-
larly the struggle of the working
people against this kind of bet-

rayal of the people and the coun- —

try, opposed and defeated the
CPR take-over of that day.

* ok *

After the Second World War,

monopoly’s drive for maximum _

profits brought about rationaliza-
tion. Technological changes in
the railway industry were brought
about at the expense of
employees and the public at large.
In the decade of the 1950s this

resulted in a 28% decline in the ©

labor force on the railways.

By the 1960s we entered a new
era— the era of the dismantling of
railway lines and the undermining
of the existence of whole com-
munities. The dismantling _ of
branch lines began with the so-
called ‘‘uneconomical’’ ones. In’
this way some 3,800 miles of
branch tracks were tom up or
abandoned. Fully 90% of these
were in the prairie provinces.

* ok

“While huge government. sub-
sidies were added to the profits
accumulated from exploitation of
labor in the industry, railway

workers, farmers, entire com--

munities as well as the public at
large, became the victims rather
than the beneficiaries of rationali-
zation. The country’s transporta-
tion system became a funnel
through which tremendous for-
tunes were amassed in the hands of
the capitalist class, i.e. the mono-
polies.

Instead of the means of trans-
portation being seen as a neces-
sary public service essential to the

country’s economy, profitability
instead of public service became
the essential factor. The scramble

for maximum monopoly profits .

turned the whole public purpose
of the transportation industry up-
side down. :

_ This meant ‘that Canadian
monopoly capital had travelled
around in a circle from railroad
building to railway dismantling.
The ‘‘user must pay”’ policy, as
now determined by the mono-
polies in our modem Canadian
society, seeks to bring about a
private monopoly of the means of
transportation while seeking
more public funds for more and
ever-more rationalization and
higher monopolies profits.

* kK *

A Bill (C-33) now.before parli-
ament is, in essence, a series of
amendments to the National
Transportation Act of 1967.

Under this bill the door is
opened to many changes. The
elimination of long-haul and
short-haul rate differentials is a
bow to monopoly interests of
western Canada who have com-
plained long and bitterly about
rates charged on the shipment of

steel from eastern Canada. At the

same time the government seeks

to remove an $11-million subsidy
on flour and grain moving east by
rail from the prairies. This latter
move will mean higher costs for
eastern Canadian farmers buying
feed grain from the west.

The bill now before parliament
also provides that, where gov-
emment policy requires a depar-
ture from the objective of com-
mercial viability, any additional
costs must be assumed by the gov-
ernment.

Obviously, what this points to
is the need for a publicly-owned
and controlled transportation sys-
tem, fully integrated to include
rail, road, air, water and pipelines
— as long advocated by the
“Communist Party of Canada.

a

But the government is moving
in the opposite direction. Trans-
port Minister Otto Lang has told
the CN management to decide
which profit centres — rail,
trucks, hotels — make enough
money to be attractive to private
investors. These profit centres
could then be tumed into sub-
sidiaries with some shares sold to
private investors.

‘‘For the CN to sell off profit-
making operations to make
money for stockholders instead of
to offset the cost of essential ser-
vices is just ludicrous”’ says Na-
tional Farmers Union president,
Roy Atkinson. Selling off parts of
the CN to private investors “‘does
not give Canada a national rail
system to be used as an instru-
ment for social and economic de-
velopment,’’ said Atkinson.

Jack Wynter, Legislative Di-
rector of the Canadian Brother-
hood of Railway, Transport and
General Workers, has called for
nationalization of the Canadian
Pacific.

“CP Rail’s main purpose is to
maximize profits. But if Canada
decides that it is in the national
interest to develop a modern pas-
senger service network, it will be
necessary to sacrifice profits for
social objective. There is no role
for private enterprise in such a
system. (To be continued next
week.)

BOYCOTT J. P. STEVENS

The Amalgamated Clothing & Textile Workers are conducting a
boycott against the No. 1 anti-union employer in North America.
The union is asking consumers to boycott the following J. P.
Stevens products: Stevens, Twist Twil, Academy, Lady Consort,
Stevetex, Fine Arts, Beauti-Blend, Utica, Tastemaker, Simtex, Fruit
of the Loom and Big Mama. Pictured above a demonstration out-
side the company’s stockholder meeting in New York.

i : PACIFIC TRIBUNE=MARCH 25,-1977—Page 5